There are few forms of loneliness more painful than the kind that happens in the presence of others. That is what I see in Fomapan 100: two subway cars facing one another, their square windows revealing solitary figures within. They are close enough to notice, yet sealed in their own compartments, bowed inward, unreachable. It is a portrait of proximity without connection, of lives that almost touch but never meet.
I have known this kind of loneliness. For much of my life, I have walked alone, not in bitterness but in resignation, tending to my inner life in solitude. I do not regret my marriage—it was part of my becoming—but it was also deeply unfulfilling. Emotionally, we were on different wavelengths. Physically, we weren’t even in the same universe. Toward the end, I discovered just how isolating it can feel to share space with someone and still remain unseen. The walls between us thickened, not through malice, but through silence.
This is the ache the photograph captures: two people side by side, yet absent to one another. The most cutting loneliness is not solitude, but the emptiness that arrives when another person is there in body but not in presence.
Psychologists describe this as parallel living. Two lives share the same roof, the same routines, yet no longer intersect. Meals are eaten, bills are paid, plans are made—but the flow of intimacy has dried up. Silence fills the space, not as comfort but as reminder. Martin Buber once described this drift as the movement from I-Thou to I-It: the other becomes not a full being encountered, but a shadow, a role, an object in the room. Parallel living is that condition—lives moving side by side like rails that never cross.
The photograph’s choice of film, Fomapan 100, underscores this tension. Fomapan is deliberate, slow, and textured. It resists the disposability of digital speed. It holds what the eye might miss—the bowed head, the quiet estrangement, the steel barrier that is both literal and metaphorical. Film dignifies what would otherwise be a fleeting, forgettable moment, and in that dignity, it forces us to look again.
And yet, loneliness also carries instruction. Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.” Even estrangement sharpens our awareness of what presence should be. To ache for connection is to be reminded of our capacity for encounter, our hunger to be seen. Missed connections, however painful, testify to the fact that connection is possible.
The photograph builds in me a paradoxical ache. It mirrors the walls I have known in my own life, but it also acknowledges endurance. To live parallel is to suffer absence, but it is also to continue moving forward. Like the passengers in Fomapan 100, I remain enclosed in my own compartment, yet carried somewhere all the same—alone, yes, but still in motion.